We've been slow to adopt this forum for discussion of our project, which has only recently started to take off. This is because there's been a tremendous amount of discussion on the Bearce yahoo group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BEARCE/ but since some of the recent participants did not come out of that group, and since this forum can be followed without needing to "join" anything, we'll move the conversations about the DNA results here.

We currently have 4 participants in the Y-DNA project, one is hg J1, one is J2, and 2 are R1a. Because we don't have complete paper trails we can't yet make a determination as to the haplogroup of Austin Bearse, our patriarch of interest. We are awaiting results of a new participant to "break the tie".

Meanwhile we have located two candidates for the mtDNA test to find out whether Austin's wife Mary was Native American or not. The first of these is due in sometime in October.

I'll update the discussion page of our WF site, and try to update and correct some of the other pages too. Besides the active yahoo group, we also have an online tree and some background at http://www.arborfamilias.com/ - which is quite extensive and easy to navigate. That's why the pedigree page here is empty, though we certainly encourage anyone who wants to post their lineages here. I'll incorporate it into the tree on our site.